Name me a good colorist/colourist

"you're all a buncha.... colorists"

"i said - " *gasp* "COLORISTS!!"

On one level my favourite is the man who did much of V For Vendetta, but since he has been one of my best friends for nearly 25 years, I am biased.

In art: I really like the Delaunays, and Klee is an all-time favourite colourist, but I was thinking earlier about Fiona Rae, my favourite living artist under 70. There is a subtle richness and originality in her colour work that I adore. She uses mauves better than anyone ever.

In film, no contest: Hiroshi Teshigahara. I wrote about Rikyu (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098204/) on FT a while back, and it is by far the most ravishingly beautiful film I've ever seen, and that is more to do with his colour sense than anything else. There is scene after scene that uses different palettes, different kinds of palettes, every few minutes, and it's regularly breathtaking.

The story goes: Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Correggio, Reynolds, and Turner.

But I'll say Giovanni Bellini too.

David Batchelor explains Warhol as formalist in his brilliant book Chromophobia, using the prep drawing of the paint by numbers as an illustration to a chapter called
Apocolypstick after the Serge Gainsbourg song. Batchelor calls into
question the idea of Warhol as cold, as someone who did not care about
formal concerns--of Warhol as no more of a painter then the robots who
paint cars in Detroit automobile plants. He moves Warhol into a
painterly obsessiveness, a creamy, campy, colour fieldist. The chapter
is about colour as a signifier of decadence--back to Marilyn's eye
shadow, the gold buttocks, the painterly smears of tabloids and
Iranian princesses.

Batchelor talks about Warhol bringing trash to life--but not
the ordinary idea of film gossip and casual sex, not the conceptual
trash Warhol is forgiven for but a formalist, painterly trash. This is
a low trash of mark-making, colour and technique, a trash of bright
pinks, acid greens, lemon yellows, crimsons--and a trash of lurid
smeared shapes, half traced lines and blackened corners.

Warhol's use of colour, according to Batchelor, is decorative and
transformative. The decorative comes because it does not seem to
connect to any larger concern aside from being pretty, it does not
open up spaces, abut other colours in strange ways, recede or command.
It is not the colours
of the abstract expressionists who came before him or the starkness
of the minimalists who trained colour after him. It is the colour of
cosmetics, literally (lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, bronzer) and
figuratively (the colour that is there just to be, the colour of
candy, waxed fruit, silk flowers, the arch colour of the other.)

as for freud, his sickly, rotting, flesh--his treating the most obv. examples of desire as fleshbags--is haunting and sickening--and he has gotten better at it. (the pus yellow of the robe, and the sallow porridge of the exposed breast in the painting of the staffordshire terroir and woman from the mid 50s or even the v. recent kate moss, or he shadows that hide in the corpulence of bowery

Freud's color is just as you say it, and that's may well be all there is to it.

Does that make me an old stodge.